57
votes
We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth, Jason Hickel
- Published
- Jun 10 2026
- Word count
- 1188 words
An opinion in the Guardian in support of the Global Justice Report. From the article:
On the one hand I do believe this is the direction the global economy should and will take, but on the other hand, this is the kind of progress that happens one funeral at a time.
The Global Justice Report website you shared appears to be hacked, on clicking to see full report it fails to show the pdf, but on the archive there is a post "Hacked by ChinaFans" with their telegram links: https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026/06/GlobalJusticeReport_WebsiteVersion.pdf
I don't think its actively dangerous, but still thought I'd give the heads up
Reads like a PR piece. A whole article on this roadmap and I dont think they discuss a single thing the plan proposes.
Like, how are you gonna throw around all this rhetoric about global justice and reducing inequality and trade unions and stuff, how we have a moral obligation to center all that at the core of our decisions on everything, and then not actually explain what this does for any of that? What are we even talking about here?
Edit: I just looked again and saw that Jason Hickel is one of the authors. That tracks.
It took me a few clicks but I found the actual policies he's advocating for, from a link the in article:
https://www.neep-poverty.org/roadmap-for-eradicating-poverty-beyond-growth/economic-systems-transformation/
Thanks for digging this up. They seem like fairly standard socialist/socialist-adjacent policies.
I've never hear the name. Can someone fill me in?
Hes an economist who is sort of an unofficial spokesperson for the Degrowth economic philosophy.
Ive listened to a couple of his talks in the past to try and understand what Degrowth was, and the writing style here matches the tone of those presentations.
Theres nothing particularly wrong with the guy, I just always felt like in his discussions he talked more like a politician than an economist.
Sort of minor, but he’s actually an economic anthropologist, not an economist. Economic anthropology, such as it is, is a more politically-flavored field that’s critical of mainstream economics. Point being that Hickel’s degrees are in anthropology, not a quantitative or math-related field.
I really don’t like Hickel or cultural anthropology (though I’m trying to keep that bias out of this comment), but co-authors Stiglitz and Piketty are serious economists, so it’s not fair to throw the whole article out based just on that.
Why don't you like cultural anthropology?
Initial warning: This is a personal opinion, not a statement on how the world works. I’m happy to debate this opinion, but I’m not trying to conclusively, objectively prove that the field is compromised or anything like that.
—
Some cultural anthropology is okay. My primary issue is that in the beginning, anthropology (including cultural anthropology) was about trying to understand completely foreign systems. It’s impossible to do that completely objectively, of course; any human can’t help but view new things through the framing of information and beliefs we already have. But as the field matured, the more modern strands of cultural anthropology seem to be far more focused on explicitly applying pre-existing political lenses to whatever it is they’re studying. It’s not “I’m going to go see how it is,” anymore, so much as “I’m going to go see how [X] theory (typically something Marx-adjacent) explains how it is.”
The pre-existing bias became the feature, not something to try to control for.
Again, I’m not saying that the field should be shut down or is objectively bad or anything like that. Just saying that’s not how I think research should be done.
Ah right that's interesting. I wanted to study cultural anthropology but ended up doing social science which I suppose has a wider application in the regards to work.
I don't want to derail this thread but how do you feel about other branches of anthropology? No need to answer if its basically indifference.
It’s pretty case-dependent, I think. I also don’t want to claim that I’m familiar enough with the various distinctions to have a really coherent opinion on all of them.
I think before the Marxist/Critical Theory adjacent format become in vogue the thing was to assert the obvious rectitude of 1950s gender roles and racial essentialisms. The degraded pop form of evolutionary psychology kept going this way too. And now we’re in the other swing of the pendulum.
Yeah, I think you're right. The problem isn't any specific ideology per se, it's researchers coming in with the goal to prove X instead of see whats's true about X, if that makes sense .
You can click on their
author.jason hickeltag to see previous articles written by them, posted to Tildes. There are 5 articles.Thanks, will do!
I mean we have as a society pursued growth maximization in an effectively closed system for more than half a century.
The problem is resource allocation not lack of resources. Though that will be problem shortly due to almost a century of optimizing for growth at the expense of other considerations.
"Economic growth" is an extremely vague concept. What kind of growth is it? Some kinds of economic growth have to be better than others, and we should make distinctions.
There are some kinds of economic growth that I'm quite dubious of. The gold rush to build datacenters as rapidly as possible, for example. What's the hurry? Seems like it's due to greed and competition.
However, I don't see how anyone could deny that some poor countries are severely lacking in economic growth of nearly all kinds. To say that we don't need any more economic growth seems like the sort of "luxury belief" that would only make sense to rich people in rich countries.
Edit: clarified wording.
Could be the inevitable end of our lives that's driving the hurry.
It can be trivially denied using data available to anyone.
(GDP is nominal per capita)
Life expectancy has grown by ~20 years in low-income countries. Child mortality has lessened significantly. Literacy, electrification, access to clean water: pretty much everything has become better almost everywhere.
Some countries are waging war or are internally mismanaged so badly (usually due to socialist policies) that they have become poorer. Pretty much every poor country that has been able to avoid war and has adapted sensible free-market, non-kleptocratic liberal policies has grown significantly in every way.
Admittedly, "sensible" is doing a lot of lifting in that previous paragraph. Unfortunately, there's no easy recipe for growth. It's not just "do whatever Milton Friedman suggested", but it still seems rather clear that in a broad stroke the free market approach works very well.
Re the socialist policies, I've come around to a few theories. Any proclaimed failure directly attributied to socialism is invalid if:
That rules out an awful lot of the supposed intrinsic inevitable failure of planned economies.
This was historically controversial amongst heterodox economists. There were historically a lot of debates over the viability of "socialism in one country". Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping's liberalization, India's opening up, and the rise of the Four Asian Tigers, consensus has further consolidated around the benefits of free trade and market economies.
Part of the issue is how many different systems get clubbed together under the label of socialism.
Edit: grammar.
My bet would be on some kind of market-modulated socialism; I’ve done enough computational modelling of complex shit that I don’t trust myself of anyone else to get it right when it depends heavily on predicting human irrationality, but I do trust the ability of large groups of irrational humans to follow incentives. Just need to change the ownership system to align those incentives a bit better rather than trying to fight entropy and control the downstream allocation system.
This is called “Market Socialism” and Proudhonism was a whole political tendency of its own in the 19th century. Marxists absolutely hated it but eventually most of the palatable market socialist ideas got incorporated into the New Deal and digested into mainstream liberalism/social democratic thought while the more collective ownership elements faded away.
"intrinsic inevitable" is doing a lot of work there. You can rule out a lot of failures by saying they weren't intrinsic or inevitable, but they're still failures, at least until the country finally succeeds.
Meanwhile, the track record for growth due to export-led global trade is pretty good. It's certainly not "pure" capitalism since it's often due to intentional government policy. (China is an example!) But it's embedded in a trade-based global framework.
But a "trade based global network" says nothing about capitalism, socialism, any of that. The question of ownership of the means of production and the distribution of any excess capacity or resources to the population is separate from whether a country produces, purchases, or sells any goods or services.
If a purely socialist system succeeded at exporting, say, cars that consumers in other countries will buy, that would be quite an achievement! And tough to do now when competing with China.
But the place to start is probably something like manufacturing clothing. The bottom isn't a country that has a clothing export industry like Bangladesh. It's the countries that can't even do that. There was an attempt to build a clothing industry in Haiti after the earthquake, but it's collapsed further since then.
You're right. The global economic consensus on trade is a policy of liberalism and free markets, not necessarily capitalism versus socialism. Centrally planned economies pretty much all failed or stalled out. Most countries' economic system looks more like capitalism than traditional socialism though.
This implies that socialism creates far weaker economies, if they can be simply sanctioned away.
It seems to me that simply "powerful computers" isn't quite the magic sauce that would make those systems work. But I'm certainly intrigued of the possibility of a deeply planned economy working in the future with the help of LLMs and other new computing things.
All economies are essentially planned economies. Socialism is a bit more invasive than that.
As far as I know, the most canonical argument here is Towards a New Socialism, written in 1993 by a scottish computer scientist — that may even be what @vord had in mind. The basic thesis is exactly that: that computers will enable a planned economy where it was previously impossible.
Personally I think there are a huge number of issues that computers cannot solve, and I think planned economies are a mistake. The problem with the Soviet Union’s economy (which is the primary example Towards a New Socialism reacts to) wasn’t insufficient processing power. But if you’re interested in reading the opposing view, that’s a good place to start.
I would contend the primary problem with the USSR's economy was being founded during 2 world wars and then being run by a dictator while a bunch of proxy wars were being fought.
That, and having to deal with all the assorted problems that come from the transition from agrarian to industrialized economies, which the West had already gone through at a much slower pace by 1920ish.
It'd kinda be like if Brazil had to start pumping out tanks and a space program on their own starting tomorrow, while the USA put trade sanctions on them and put up a naval blockade.
There’s no doubt that those factors mattered - a lot, probably - but it’s important to point out that mainstream economists - even socialist economists, and even marxist economists in most cases - do not share the view that external factors were the primary cause of the USSR’s economic woes. The economic consensus (again, even among sympathetic economists) is that the planned economy failed due to internal factors.
The authors of Towards a New Socialism also primarily blame internal factors, not external factors. That’s why they wrote their whole book, after all.
If you stomp on a sapling, it will probably be a broken or dead tree. States are especially prone to be dominated by military despots like Stalin during wartime. And since pretty much every economic success case since 1945 has been "Economy only boosts when trading with USA under favorable conditions" it would follow that a country operating under trade sanctions might be at more than a slight disadvantage. It doesn't matter if you have the entire world's oil supply under your feet if nobody will trade it for food.
@R3qn65 is correct, that is where I first stumbled upon the idea. I became more and more convinced it is possible given the proliferation of ERP systems and JIT logistics. Amazon alone is basically 90% of the way toward being able to do the 'hard' part. Powerful computers isn't the sole answer, but rather the integration of ERP systems into the very fabric of manufacturing.
Quotes solicited, invoices issued and paid, inventory received and tracked, shipping labels, booking, payroll, everything. Any company with more than a tiny handful of employees has deployed all of this with off-the-shelf solutions.
I'd be curious to understand more what you mean by 'more invasive.' In a modern democratic system, the functional difference between a socialist system and a capitalist one is 'Jeff Bezos owns Amazon' and 'The USPS owns Amazon.'
I personally don't think LLMs themselves have any bearing to improve the situation, given most of the pieces we would need to do so already exist, many of them publicly owned. People forget that in the USA, 95% or so of weather data comes from the NOAA, which private entities repackage and add on some small bits to sell to you.
And if we had our modern weather predicting power and agricultural science in 1915, odds are the USSR wouldn't have ever had that famine that kinda broke the horse's leg at the start of the race, if you will.
Except, of course, for:
— The USSR itself, from 1945 to about 1960
— China until about 2001 (when they joined the WTO)
— India throughout the 90s
— Venezuela until the 1980s
— The gulf states (secured by the US, but primarily exporting elsewhere)
— Norway
— Botswana
And I’m sure there are more. The Asian Tigers, however, generally match your statement here.
I 100% recognize that this was not your intention, but for your awareness a Ukrainian would probably consider this comment fairly offensive. Scholarly consensus is that the Holodomor was man-made due to short-sighted Soviet agricultural policy, though whether it was intentionally orchestrated to weaken the Ukrainians is still quite disputed (my money is on that it was not). Whether intentional or an accident of collectivization and dekulakization, what’s not under dispute is that it had nothing to do with weather prediction technology.
Yes, there are many success stories. I’m saying that economic growth for the poor countries where it hasn’t happened yet (mostly in Africa) is very important.
Every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs" as though that is inherently good no matter what, I'm thinking that if I start vandalizing people's property, I will be able to help create more jobs. Repairs, manufacturing replacements, cleanup...even the opportunity cost of taking the time to deal with the vandalism would effectively create more jobs and stimulate the economy. Disregarding the externalities of creating new things to replace broken ones, vandalism targeted at people with a lot of money in particular is a utilitarian dream. For someone with more money than they can spend, the cost of the vandalism will be a minor inconvenience. They will employ workers to deal with it, who will get paid and then pay it forward to other workers via their consumption and taxes.
That doesn't inherently require a growth of the economy as a whole. There is already a huge amount of capital concentrated where it's not needed. Also, even where valuable resources are available in poorer countries, in many cases they are carefully funnelled into rich countries where their capital value is realized. Equitable redistribution might have been a solution to this problem under a system which doesn't reward greed and concentration.
When you write “growth of the economy as a whole,” do you mean for the entire world? Generally speaking, less economic growth in one country doesn’t imply more economic growth in a different country. It’s more like economic setbacks are sometimes contagious. Example:
Asian Financial Crisis
More spending in the US on imports has helped growth in many other countries that have exporting industries. Cutting back on spending (as threatened by Trump’s tariffs) doesn’t help.
A major exception is that increased carbon emissions are bad worldwide. That really is zero-sum. But that’s not true of most kinds of economic activity.
Yes.
I'm not sure how that relates to the message you replied to, which doesn't suppose that this is or isn't the case. It's not a "luxury belief" that we can achieve better circumstances for poor countries without a growth of the economy regardless of whether that's true.
I would rather call the Asian financial crisis a financial setback that only had economic effects because we've made finance instrumental to how we allocate and govern economic resources. That's not an inherent property of an economic system, but a political choice. When access to economic resources is governed by financial investment driven by less than perfect information and financial gain as the goal rather than real need, bubbles and financial contagions are inevitable. It was the financial problem that spread, causing similar economic effects in other countries.
Financial markets are a cornerstone of every major economy. Governments intervene to varying degrees, but there is near universal consensus on the long-run efficiency of markets.
Is there something you want to say about financial markets that actually pertains to the comment you're replying to, or am I just a soapbox for neoliberal talking points here?
I read this as a proposal to get away from markets in general, and I don't see how that'd be viable. There's a balance between government intervention and free markets that limit some of this, but I don't know of any perfect systems that completely avoid misallocation of resources.
Well, that's not how I wrote it. It's not a proposal in any way, and it's not a criticism of the general concept of markets.
For the record I thnk a market where the means to profit from anything but the production of goods and services were much more limited would also be much less susceptible to bubbles and crashes. I don't propose to know what measures would effectively produce such markets.
Markets where you can easily capitalize on things that aren't productive enable profit from things like debt and speculation, which from an empirical point of view seemingly inevitably produce situations where markets go crazy for other reasons than changes in the forces of production. This is a criticism of a specific aspect of some kinds of markets, not of markets in general.
The main site of this initiative with more information about their ideas: New Economies for Eradicating Poverty
One of the authors here, Kate Raworth, wrote a book several years back about this need to limit growth within 'planetary boundaries'.
The book and model is called Doughnut Economics. She proposes an economic model that rather focuses on the stability, health, wellbeing of both the people and planet, rather than one that focuses purely on growth. Growth is at the center of many current economies but the metric doesn't value or measure metrics of human and planet well-being. By refocusing on actual values, she develops an opposite model of needing to limiti growth and maintain certain resource boundaries - using enough to support needs but not excessively to permanently damage the environment.
The result of a model like that would look like a "doughnut" with upper and lower bounds.
I thought the model was very interesting and aligned well with my values. But i thought the book lacked specifics on how to get that done. Im glad to see that per the NEEP roadmap, its been more further developed/ coordinated with many others into something thats hopefully actionable.
Ive heard of Kate Raworth before, but never read her book.
My thoughts concerning her ideas are: Dont we already do this?
She and Jason Hickel have this persistent critique of making all our decisions based on GDP, but we dont actually make all our decisions by just putting policies into the GDP computer and seeing if number go up.
When we put subsidies on life necessities like food and water and electricity, thats focusing on the wellbeing of people.
When we put environmental regulations on dumping waste into rivers or emitting ozone destroying aerosols, thats focusing on planetary health.
You could argue that you want more action in these areas, but the framework is there.
This is stuff we figured out like...a while ago. People have been having serious discussions for decades about the specifics of how to get that done.
But these two talk about it like this is some revolutionary paradigm shift, and its like theyre throwing out decades of work on the subject to start from scratch.
Which could be interesting if they approach it from a new angle and find new insights. But looking at their roadmap, much of what Im seeing looks like typical progressive proposals. Raise taxes on the rich and corporations and redirect those resources toward other causes.
Why is a paradigm shift necessary for that?
I don't think it really addresses the isssue. Sure all that sounds nice but the model needs to start at human nature. There are more people than jobs/work to go around. Even for high achieving people. There would need to be some sort of indenture system that you need to participate X hrs X years per X to take from the system and recharge every so often.
Then of course you would run into the problem of whom would work harder for harder jobs if they have everything without doing things that require years of grueling study and experience like being a doctor for one example. Then whom is going to make higher quality stuff that people whom want more than the bare minimum aspire to? Humans run on motivation like it or not.
I assume humanity will resolve it the same way as all of recorded history. Mountains and mountains of bodies.